Motivation Is Best When It Comes from Deep Inside
by peroxidepest17
Summary: Fuuta and Reborn work together to motivate Lambo.


**Title:** Motivation Is Best When It Comes from Deep Inside of You(r Pants)  
**Universe: **Reborn  
**Theme/Topic: **RebornxLambo stuffs!  
**Rating:** PG  
**Character/Pairing/s:** lightly RebornxLambo, with appearances  
**Warnings/Spoilers:** Slightly spoilery for 10yl , probably OOC?  
**Word Count:** 2,300  
**Su****mmary:** Fuuta and Reborn work together to motivate Lambo.  
**Dedication:** for juin's late, late, late, late birthday request! I got to it eventually! LOL Though now it is more like a half birthday fic. Sob.  
**A/N:** I tried for something serious but then that failed and I went back to the cracks. SORRY JUIN. I love you though.  
**Disclaimer:** No harm or infringement intended.

* * *

While everyone had admittedly hoped for such a thing to happen many years ago, in a time of peace, the fact that Lambo actually _is_ mellowing with age is decidedly not useful now, when they are smack in the middle of a grueling war.

At least when he was five he'd try to blow things up every once in a while and succeed, but as the lightning guardian fast approaches his sixteenth birthday, it seems that he's lost that youthful luster of yore and has committed himself to stopping and smelling the flowers (literally) instead, skipping training sessions for naps and opting out of fistfights with Gokudera in lieu of holding up his hands and saying, "Give, give!" before he gets a fist in his face. When everyone asks him why he's so willing to have his ass beat like that, Lambo simply shrugs (or yawns, or both) and says that he's just at the age when making love is more important than war.

"I thought puberty and hormones and stuff were supposed to make him _more _temperamental!" Gokudera complains one afternoon, when he and Lambo return from doing some unsuccessful recon around the city. Lambo may have fallen asleep on his watch and then cried pathetically after Gokudera had punched him in the face for it afterwards.

Fuuta looks apologetic as the storm guardian complains about his young charge to him. "I'll talk to him," he promises Gokudera, not for the first time.

As it is, Fuuta has already tried everything he could think of to motivate Lambo. He started by bribing the kid with candy; that worked for the first five or six years but seems to have lost its appeal with time; apparently striking and manly men don't find love by being fat or liking things made up of bright, childish colors. Now everything seems to be in one ear out the other with Lambo and not even the threat of severe punishment can get anything but a murmured, "Endure!" from the young Bovino.

"Lambo," Fuuta starts later that afternoon, when Lambo is lounging around in one of the training rooms, stretched out in the corner reading a shoujo manga issue that one of the family operatives had managed to sneak back onto the base recently, "Lambo we should train. Gokudera-nii was really frustrated this morning, ne."

Lambo looks up, blinking one-eyed at him. "Don't look so sad," he tells the older mafioso genially, and reaches into his shirt pocket. He pulls out a little yellow flower and hands it to Fuuta with a grin. "Nice, right?" He smiles dreamily to himself.

Fuuta sighs and helplessly accepts the little flower as Lambo returns to reading his romance comics; he isn't sure what else he can do anymore.

* * *

Reborn looks thoughtful when Fuuta asks him for advice afterwards, the tiny hit man calmly sitting cross-legged on the floor of the main training room while the Tenth screams like a little girl in the background as he dodges a flurry of fiery debris that looks a lot like meteorites being aimed at his head from above. "He says he's interested in love, not fighting," Fuuta sighs.

"That idiot Bovino just needs stronger motivation," Reborn assesses professionally after a moment, though his expression doesn't change. He cracks his knuckles, somehow still very convincing despite being trapped in the body of a well-dressed toddler. "I'll take care of this."

"It burns!" Tsuna yelps out loud, from somewhere in the smoke and fire behind them.

* * *

The next morning, Fuuta isn't the one who wakes Lambo up to drag him out of bed for a morning jog.

The next morning it's Reborn, and a RPG launcher, and a flaming pile of metal and death where Lambo's bed used to be that wakes him up for his morning jog.

"Get up," Reborn says, voice flat, as the smoke curls up from the grenade launcher and the fire alarms go off overhead. The sprinkler system soaks Lambo as he stares at Reborn in disbelief.

And then he scrambles to his feet, shouting, "Endure!" to himself while he puts on his pants and chokes on smoke.

Because while he's more interested in love than fighting, even he knows that he still has to be _alive_ to do either of them.

Reborn manages to get him up and down Fuji-san that morning, before he collapses and has to be dragged back to the base by the horns.

* * *

Fear works for a little while after that (the RPG launcher is very convincing), but eventually, like most of the abuse from before, Lambo gets used to it and the quality of his work suffers in proportion. It prompts Reborn to wonder if he maybe he should get a real live missile launcher next, though he knows from experience that carrying those things around is a pain when he is so very small. It doesn't help that the hallways here are also very narrow and sometimes missile launchers are difficult to aim correctly.

There are some interesting things Reborn can do with a knife as well, he supposes, but the warning shots from those tend to be less like warning shots and more like instances that necessitate blood transfusions and emergency field tourniquets.

Which isn't unappealing in its own right, but at the same time, it wastes time and blood packs, which the family tries their best to save for Ryohei and Gokudera, since they always seem to lose so much of it at any one given time.

Thoughtful, Reborn picks up the RPG launcher again and supposes that for the time being, he can always just fire closer and closer to Lambo's head the lazier he gets.

He'll have to think of something else soon, though, because the idiot cow really doesn't seem interested in getting stronger at all.

* * *

When Fuuta sees a grim-faced Reborn request a standard military issue missile launcher from Giannini two weeks after his special one-on-one training with Lambo had first started, Fuuta wonders if he should really worry about Lambo now.

"He got a…a…_missile _launcher?" Tsuna frets, when he hears about the shipment's arrival over breakfast the following day. "What is he thinking? Wasn't the RPG thing enough already?"

"Totally," Ryohei agrees, around a mouthful of extreme oatmeal (raw oats with half a dozen raw eggs stirred in). "I mean, how's a little guy like Reborn-san going to carry something as huge as a missile launcher around with him? He'll probably need to train a year with my master before he can even pick it up properly."

Tsuna looks like he wants to say that that's not the real problem here, but Fuuta realizes that Sasagawa-kun is bringing up a good point in his own way; how _does_ Reborn-san plan to…

"Oh no," he says to himself, when he gets it.

And then, before anyone can ask, Fuuta bolts from the breakfast table.

* * *

The training room is already a smoking mess of hot metal and frayed wires by the time he gets there, the huge blast door hanging from a hinge with a teenager-sized lump right in the middle.

Staring at the carnage, Fuuta also thinks he sees the shadow of a tall, slim man against one of the far walls in his periphery, but the sparks from the exposed circuits and the flickering of the lights make it seem like an illusion, a trick of the mind. When he blinks again, the image is gone.

Fuuta shakes his head before cautiously picking a path towards the center of the room, where he eventually finds Lambo, burned and bruised and bloody, stretched out on the middle of the floor with the charred remains of his Flower Comics issue scattered all around him.

Reborn, tiny and calm as ever, stands beside the teenager, with a calculating expression on his small face. "Hmmm," he says, and Fuuta sees the broken pieces of a brand new missile launcher imbedded in one of the far walls, sparkling with remnants of blue lightning. "That was unexpected."

Eventually, Reborn seems to shrug mentally and come to terms with whatever it is he's thinking about as he leans in and whispers something into Lambo's ear, something Fuuta can't make out at all.

Then Reborn turns to Fuuta with an inscrutable smile on his toddler's face. "Even if he's stupid, Lambo can be strong when he wants to be. Isn't that nice, Fuuta?" he asks.

Then, without another word, he toddles peacefully out of the room, leaving his broken missile launcher and his broken lightning guardian behind.

"Lambo!" Fuuta cries once Reborn is gone, and bends down at the lolling teenager's side, shaking him fiercely. "Lambo, are you okay?"

Lambo makes a noise in the back of his throat as he stirs, but it isn't as much a groan of pain than it's a kind of goofy rumble that makes Fuuta wonder if there is a bleeding head wound somewhere on Lambo that he hasn't found yet. Maybe his brains are leaking out all over the floor right at this very moment.

"Lambo!" he repeats, and starts examining Lambo's scalp for any signs of cerebral hemorrhaging.

Thankfully, Lambo manages to reply after a minute, gasping, "Fuuta," as he reaches up to grab the collar of his mentor's sweater vest firmly. And then he smiles, big and dreamy, with one eye open (and the other swollen shut). "I saw something beautiful just now," he says.

And then he passes out again.

Fuuta takes him to the infirmary after that, and makes Giannini perform a full brain scan with his most expensive piece of scanning equipment. Twice.

* * *

Two mornings later, when Lambo can walk again, Fuuta is surprised to find the lightning guardian already up and ready to go right at seven am, when Fuuta traditionally comes into Lambo's room and spends the next fifteen minutes shaking him awake and begging him to come outside.

"Lambo?" he asks, and is very weirded out that the younger boy is already midway through his calf stretches. "Are you okay?"

Lambo is humming.

The brain scan had said nothing was wrong that hadn't always been wrong with the lightning guardian, but sometimes Fuuta wonders if Giannini only says these things because he's not a doctor at all and doesn't actually know how to read a brain scan in the first place.

Sometimes Fuuta wishes Shamal was gay, so that they could get more licensed opinions about these things on a regular basis, instead of whenever Shamal was feeling charitable.

"Me? I'm fine. I'm great," Lambo replies, taking a deep breath. Then that goofy smile is back on his face again, all dreamy-like and strange. "I'm better than great. Let's work hard today."

Fuuta thinks he should be happy to hear that, but on the other hand, he wonders if Reborn did something awful to Lambo to make him like this. Like brainwashed him, or something. Leon can make some very weird things (like drugs) from inside the depths of his body when prompted by Reborn, after all.

Fuuta approaches cautiously.

"I thought," he begins, and tries to be sensible, "I thought you were more interested in love than in fighting."

Lambo grins and runs a hand through his hair. "I am a man in love," he explains, striking something a lot like a pose. "And that is why I must fight."

Fuuta stares. "What? What happened? Did you hit your head after all the other day?"

"The other day?" Lambo begins, cheeks flushing with youth and vitality, "The other day I fell in love at first sight." He puts his hand out in front of him, as if recalling some great, epic adventure. "The minute it happened there were explosions of light and the air grew so thick I could barely breathe. I felt like my whole body was on fire."

Fuuta thinks that he probably felt all those things because they are exactly what happened. It's good that he remembers that much, at least.

"And then, as I felt myself falling through the ashes and smoke, being reborn, I heard a voice," Lambo explains, with a romantic, flower-smelling type of sigh and another toss of his admittedly stylishly quaffed hair. "It told me that if I wanted to see the face of this important person ever again, I would have to be strong enough to make him come out to meet me."

Fuuta blinks. "_Him_? You fell in love at first sight the other day while you were in the…"

Fuuta, being naturally smarter than most of the people on the base with the exception of possibly Hibari-san, Bianchi-san, and (on rare occasions) Gokudera-nii, feels the pieces all suddenly click into place then, in a rush of explosive imagery, mysterious shadows on the wall, and Reborn-san's inscrutable smile as he'd padded out of the room amidst the flaming wreckage.

Lambo starts his toe-touches in the meantime, and resumes humming happily to himself.

Fuuta wonders if he should say something.

But before he can, Lambo says something first, and when it is as welcome a question as, "Shall we run?" Fuuta finds that he can't do anything else but sigh and nod in response.

"Yes," he says eventually, "let's go running."

They conquer Fuji-san together that day before noon, and when Lambo doesn't complain once about it (though he does stop a few times here and there to pick flowers and sigh dreamily to himself), Fuuta supposes that whatever gets you up in the mornings and keeps you moving can't be something anyone holds against you.

Even if it is something that makes other people scared that maybe something happened to you that ended with parts of your brain possibly leaking out of your ears when no one was looking.

But then again, maybe that's just love.

**END**


End file.
